In recent years, advances in technology, as well as ever evolving tastes in style, have led to substantial changes in the design of automobiles. One of the changes involves the power usage and complexity of the various electrical systems within automobiles, particularly alternative fuel vehicles, such as hybrid, electric, and fuel cell vehicles.
Many of the electrical components, including the electric motors used in such vehicles, receive electrical power from alternating current (AC) power supplies. However, the power sources (e.g., batteries) used in such applications provide direct current (DC) power. Thus, devices known as “power inverters” are used to convert the DC power into AC power. Such power inverters often utilize several switches, or transistors, operated at various intervals to convert the DC power to AC power.
Typically, the switches of the inverter are operated by using pulse-width modulation (PWM) techniques to control the amount of current and/or voltage provided to the electric motor. Often, a microprocessor architecture or control module generates PWM signals for the switches in the inverter, and provides the PWM signals to a gate driver, which turns the switches on and off. Some inverter controller modules utilize multiple processor chips mounted on a circuit board. Traditional multi-processor controller deployments for vehicle-based inverter systems utilize a single voltage regulator component that provides the regulated supply voltages to all of the processor devices. Reliance on a single voltage regulator component can be troublesome because the operation of all processor devices will be dependent upon that single component. In addition, a single voltage regulator that drives multiple processor devices can result in a high concentration of heat on the controller circuit board, and it may be difficult to effectively and efficiently dissipate the thermal energy generated by the voltage regulator.